January 14, 2010
Dear Everyone:
This week's Letter was going to be done last night, as I have a
Homeowners Association meeting tonight, but there was a time bomb
quietly ticking away until around 3:00 yesterday afternoon when it
suddenly went off.
Back in September, when I hosted our
ARMA Mt Diablo Chapter Board
Planning Meeting, we agreed to have the Chapter Meetings, followed by a
Board Meeting, on the second Wednesday of each month for the rest of
2009. Then beginning in 2010
we would change the meetings to the third Wednesday of each month.
I currently have three calendars that showed this month's meeting
taking place next week, on January 20th.
However, our Chapter President, apparently on auto-pilot,
announced that the meeting would take place on January 13th.
Even though his emailed announcement, and the Chapter Website, showed
the meeting taking place on January 13th, I didn't register the change
of date until yesterday afternoon.
I spoke with our "Hospitality Director" who makes arrangements
with the restaurant, and was bringing the Speaker.
She, the restaurant and the Speaker all had it down as next
Wednesday, but the restaurant was able to accommodate the change and the
Speaker was OK with it, so we just all showed up last night.
It was a good session, the
Speaker is an expert on
Business Continuity Planning at
UC Berkeley.
But it meant I couldn't write the Letter as I didn't get home
until much later than usual.
So I'm working on it before tonight's Homeowners Association meeting at
5:30 this evening.
The Good News is: My new
home laptop computer is coming along nicely.
Last Monday, I was able to get it to "talk" with my
MP3 player.
I went to the website and found customer support, then
"Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ).
One of the questions dealt with "why can't my computer connect
with my device?" The answer
advised making sure your device was turned on before you connect it with
the computer, something I never had to do with the old computer.
This time the program "jumped up" with "you need a new
driver!"
and proceeded to install a new driver and now everything is fine.
Now I just need to get the camera and computer "introduced" and
straighten out the mess that
Quicken has made of my checking account.
But enough about all that.
Movies:
We saw
Sherlock Holmes last
weekend. This is the new one
with Robert Downey, Jr. as
Holmes and
Jude Law as
Watson.
“Jeannie” hated it.
She doesn't like mysteries where she doesn't figure out
whodunit at
least an hour before the end of the movie.
This was because the clues were deliberately obscured, as often
happens with Holmes mysteries, one reason why I never read many of them.
So “Jeannie” spent most of the movie studying the set
decorations. At one point
she spotted a decanter which looked just like one that she has in her
collection. Downey, who was
rumored to have worked out a lot in preparation for the role, looks
pretty good, by the way.
At work, we're busily working on the
Computer Based Training (CBT) for
SharePoint for Power Users.
One of my co-workers has been recording the exercises from the
Instructor-Led Training that we are currently using.
My job is to go through the recorded exercise, comparing it to
the paper version. Where the
paper version explains why the cursor is moving the way it is, I enter
that into a Word document. I
also include what the
cursor is doing, but highlighted to indicate that
this part won't be spoken out loud.
It's more like stage direction.
When I have all the dialog and stage direction for a module completed, I
then watch a video recording of an actual two-day training session.
This way I might glean some additional "nuggets" of information
mentioned by the Instructors, and even by students, and include them in
the dialog. When all of that
is done, the Instructors review the "exercise script" and make whatever
changes they think are necessary.
In the meantime, I'm off working on the next module.
It's all very interesting and I'm learning more and more about
what can be done with SharePoint.
Pretty soon, I'll be an "expert".
Love, as always,
Pete
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